Photovoltaic Progress... Climbing the Crack

With less than 6 weeks left and 3 of those weeks eaten up for shipping that doesn't leave room for procrastinating. I am doing everything I can to be ready when the solar equipment arrives.In theory how hard can this be? All I am doing is connecting two sets of five panels together then running them to a charge controller, the output of that to the batteries, then to the inverter, then to the house wiring. That's it, basically connecting 4 pieces of equipment. The mounting system is the hard part. Commercial mounting systems are expensive and in my opinion not very sturdy. The system I built you could drive on. It took me two days to make the frame below. I cut the galvanized steel with a 10000rpm hand held grinder and I drilled all the holes with a cordless drill with very old weak batteries. It actually was a lot of physical work. I can hardly stand up. Way to many squats.


The plywood is a representation of the size of each panel. Three panels will fit on this frame. Its adjustable for summer and winter sun angles but only so far. The height of the rack concerned Katrina so I kept it short. Ideally we would want around 30 degrees in the winter and -10 in the summer. I have it set up for 18 degrees and 5 degrees.


Here it is at 18 degrees.



Katrina loves to paint. She just cant get enough of it.

This is The Crack. We practiced climbing and rappelling here last month.